Larry Kramer Accepts Inaugural Activism Award With Rousing Speech

Larry Kramer Accepts Inaugural Activism Award With Rousing Speech

Required reading and/or viewing for everyone: At a ceremony last night in New York, the incomparable Larry Kramer received the inaugural Larry Kramer Activism Award from the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a group he helped found in his own living room over 30 years ago.

Kramer — perhaps known best to the general population as the man behind the landmark play and HBO movie “The Normal Heart” — gave a rousing speech demanding a cure for HIV and AIDS and calling out the US government for their lack of assistant.

“We should have had more in 35 years,” Kramer said.

Read and/or watch the speech below (the video also includes “Normal Heart” stars Mark Ruffalo and Joe Mantello introducing Kramer to the podium).Thirty-four years. HIV/AIDS has been our plague for 34 years. We should have known more about this plague by now. 34 years is a very long time to let people die.

I think more and more about evil. I believe in evil. I believe evil is an act, intentional or not, of inflicting undeserved harm on others. Genocide is such an act. I believe genocide is being inflicted upon gay people.

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or ethnic group. Such as gay people. Such as people of color. To date, around the world, an estimated 78 million people have become infected, 39 million of whom have died. When we first became acquainted with HIV there were 41 cases.

The main difference between the Larry Kramer who helped to start Gay Men’s Health Crisis in his living room in 1982 and ACT UP in 1987 and the Larry Kramer who stands before you now is that I no longer have any doubt that our government is content, via sins of omission or commission, to allow the extermination of my homosexual population to continue unabated.

It is talk like this that got the original GMHC board to boot me off and out.

It is also talk like this that enabled ACT UP to succeed in getting us our own treatments. These treatments are not good enough but have been good enough to extend our lives. Unfortunately they still come with side effects and they reward their greedy manufacturers with more money than they would make locating the cure that would end this plague.

GMHC was my first child and its rejection was very painful. The original ACT UP self-destructed, which was also a painful experience. Once there were treatments, the desire to act up managed to evaporate rather quickly. This greatest achievement ever facilitated by the gay population—we actually went out there and got our own medicines—then decamped, now that we had a drug that would allow us to do what we did and live the lives that got us in trouble in the first place. The remnants of ACT UP, my second child, is a painful place for me to see now.

Thirty-four years is a long time for pharmaceutical manufacturers to operate in such an evil system.

Thirty-four years is a long time for every president and every Congress to sit back and let us die.

Thirty-four years is a long time for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is in charge of AIDS research, to watch his and our President and his and our Congress and their National Institutes of Health let us die.

Allowing people to die is evil and genocidal.

We should have had more in 35 years.

These are not what most people would call bad people. But these heterosexuals are not people who are losing any sleep over the death of so many millions of people.

I no longer hear the word “cure” from the remnants of ACT UP or it’s spin-off Treatment Action Group, TAG, or from anyone in our health care establishment starting with Dr. Fauci. I certainly don’t hear it from anyone in Congress or the White House. Dr. Robert Gallo said a few weeks ago that AIDS will kill far more people than Ebola ever will.

Thus what an irony to be asked back into the arms of my first child, GMHC. Just when a new executive director, Kelsey Louie, who feels and says much the same as I did and do, has taken over.

Kelsey said to me, “It has become clear to me that GMHC has every reason to be more aggressive on all fronts—especially in our public remarks.” Oh, it’s a new world at GMHC, one that I tried to start, and Kelsey Louie is very smart and caring and courageous and I congratulate the board for choosing him to be your new leader. “Many are saying that they are happy to see life back in GMHC,” board chair Roberta Kaplan, our great lesbian lawyer who secured a major marriage victory from the Supreme Court, said when she asked me to come back and I accepted.

Kelsey said the words that won over my acceptance. “We must aspire to a cure once and for all. Let’s demand a cure and a society that values people with HIV enough to pay for it. Only if we aspire to more can we demand more. Only if we demand more will we get more.”

My first child sounds like a chip off the old block. I salute him and all of you for being here to join me in supporting Kelsey and his and our new GMHC. The power to change history is still within our grasp. We cannot wait another 34 years. This evil still being waged against us must cease. The battle cry now must be one word: CURE. CURE. CURE.